Exclusive Health Education England and the GMC are set to target thousands of international medical graduates when they complete their GMC registration starting from this month.

Pulse has learned that HEE and the GMC are working together to persuade the 4,000 current international medical graduates who register to practise in the UK each year to consider applying for GP training places through the use of promotional material.

Dr Mohammad Saqib Anwar, associate medical director for NHS England in the Central Midlands, who led the plans to bring fully trained GPs to work in Lincolnshire, said that the focus is shifting towards recruiting graduates before they start specialty training.

He told Pulse: ‘When you look at international recruitment the focus on this has been about recruiting fully fledged general practitioners but part of the solution might be recruiting doctors to those training positions that we know Health Education England have that are underfilled.’

He added that ‘it’s nice’ to have fully qualified GPs to induct into the NHS but when there is a shortfall in the number of GP trainees ‘that might be another area where international recruitment can feed into’.

Dr Anwar told Pulse a push to recruit more international medical graduates was ‘under consideration’ by HEE.

He said: ‘How far that consideration has gone I wouldn’t be able to say but it’s certainly an area that is under consideration and in my view rightly so.’

The GMC confirmed that they are working with HEE to promote GP training.

Una Lane, the GMC’s director of registration and revalidation, told Pulse: ‘We are working with HEE to provide material promoting GP training to international medical graduates who have recently arrived in the UK.

She added that the material would be available ‘to those doctors who attend our London or Manchester offices to complete their registration’ from October.

She said: ‘The material is already being promoted by our Regional Liaison Advisers in England who provide training and support to those international doctors who are already working here.’

A spokesperson at HEE confirmed that while they already market GP training ‘as far and wide as is possible’, they said they have entered into ‘an informal arrangement’ with the GMC ‘to support us by promoting information on GP specialty recruitment to international medical graduates’.

NHS England said the scheme is led by HEE and deferred to them for comment.

NHS's targeting of international doctors

This is the latest scheme in the Government’s effort to deliver 5,000 more GPs by 2020.

Readers' comments (16)

Do anything and everything you can to get more GPsAnything ..so long as it does address why there is a recruitment problem in the first place.

Hopefully sometime in the not too distant future all our Drs will have been born and raised in a different country. It will certainly make all the patients they see who were also born and raised in a different country feel comfortable, and right at home, which will be marvellous, and really all that matters ..to me anyhow..because I was born and raised in a different country, I'm already over represented in the profession I work in, compaired with the population I serve and I'm really keen to increase that over representation... and aren't all British people lazy, crap and xenophobic anyway..look they just voted for BREXIT ..there's your proof.

How many themes do you recognise. Do you find any of this offensive. If so why?

Answers will of cause not be read by anyone much and are likely to only make you more entrenched in you current point of view. Besides which what does it matter ...none of us are here for long anyhow. Enjoy the sunshine when you can and give out as much love to whoever needs it as you can get away with.

The problem in a nutshell:noone wants to be one anymore. A profession of the newly qualified, in a system alien to our own will certainly increase the numbers but will do absolutely nothing to maintain standards as no one left to mentor and support them and so the trend of offloading onto A&E will continue and increase so hastening the demise of the nhs

Good for the doctors and the other countries that will eventually get these UK-trained doctors.....train them NHS and when this doctors realise how rubbish GP-life in the UK is, they can at least take their certificates to Australia and New Zealand for a better life.

Another fire fighting measure and waste of money! Improve the lives of those in the system and the current mass emigration will stop. The UK has many GPs, it is the working conditions that ater forcing early retirement, part-time working, exodus overseas et all.